pedestrienne

I was doing a trial of an ebook service called Freading and their poetry offerings included many selections from a couple of publishers. This was one of them. It had snakes on the cover and mentioned prose poems, westerns and blood in the description. So I downloaded it to try out the process.

Then I started reading some of the poems. The first one was just okay but the second one had the phrases "The river slapped the fields away" and then "Today wind rushes the empty house, licks the dinner bell inside and out. We settle down to wait. / Our lives are not what we expected. / We eat little crisp buns under the awning and peep out at the sun, the big white fury booming around in heaven."

Yessssss.

Lots of good little descriptions abound in the first, prosy, section. Prose poems are sometimes difficult for me to read because my eyes start to skim. And they can start to just sound like propositions for an atmosphere, or jottings in a dream journal. But these held together because they seemed to be talking to one another.

Then there's a really stunning long poem called "Here's Your Money".

Then I started to wonder if this was only the second Canadian poet I've read (beyond Mags Atwood).

Euphoria kind of broke the tone of the book, it wasn't really set in the world of the other poems.